1.75 CPT released

Originally Posted by vurt
I was hoping the performance would've improved (since they use some new faster shader function now) but i think it seems a bit worse actually from 1.74.

Stuttering is most certainly improved for me. Far from eliminated mind you, but I did a simple before/after test in the game start and there is a noticeable improvement. while running around from Ardea to the rebel camp to the orc fire camp. Loading is in the same places but now produces a mild hickup in comparison to the minor stall it did before. Definetely smoother… (did both runs 3 times)

Apart from that the visual improvement is not staggering but more subtle and very welcome. Textures were sharpened in several cases and the new lighting and shadowing makes the world look much less plastic and have more depth. Original settings though were too bright! I had to put gamma in -22% and brightness at -8%.

Performance hit was more substantial than I expected(*). I ran 50-60 in the opening melee to 110-130 running around the area pre 1.75. That dropped to 40-50 and 90 to 110 something afterwards but still comfortably playable. (sub a couple of more fps if you force 16AF from the control panel like I do)
(* I believe its the shadowing more than anything else)

Don't know If I am going to use color grading but it is interesting and so are the new
poisoned and "damaged" effects…

Running around just outside the start area shows a FPS of between 146-152 (using Fraps). I just think it makes it worse, jumping from incredible smooth to 2-5 FPS and pause every 20 second or something, it's just unbearable when you're going from a game like Risen which doesnt have those irritating pauses.

Doesn't go to 2-5 fps (complete stall) after the patch though (or at least not that often ).

But seriously this is still 10 times worse than the little imperceptible hitch that oblivion did iirc… If you can't stand that one then there was no way the CPT would manage to make this bearable to you without a complete rewrite of the streaming algorithm…

What else ? The comparison I did was between 1.74 to 1.75 … perhaps you tested further than the small area that I tried ? like I said its an incremental improvement but its there (I did that little run several times to hopefully avoid the placebo effect )…

In that small area instead of freezing completely for split second in the loading bits its more like a somewhat smoother but still quite pronounced hitch (i.e right after the orc fire above ardea)… But anyways

Originally Posted by vurt
Running around just outside the start area shows a FPS of between 146-152 (using Fraps). I just think it makes it worse, jumping from incredible smooth to 2-5 FPS and pause every 20 second or something, it's just unbearable when you're going from a game like Risen which doesnt have those irritating pauses.

It might actually help to cap the framerate. Iirc, there's an option to set the max fps in the ini.file. Maybe setting a limit of 60fps would make it seem a bit smoother. There's absolutely no need to have 100+ fps anyways.

Did a complete reinstall, patched the exe with 4GB_Patch and forced V-sync on. I also changed priority of the Gothic3.exe to "High". On average every 2-3 minutes it does this longer "stall" that goes on for maybe 1-1.5 second, and then there's the very short (almost unnoticable) pauses (0.1 sec or something) that happens about as often. I'd say it's on pair with Oblivion (vanilla). I can also rotate the camera around and it doesnt pause as it did before. I went away from the starting area this time though.

Did a complete reinstall, patched the exe with 4GB_Patch and forced V-sync on. On average every 2-3 minutes it does this longer "stall" that goes on for maybe 1-1.5 second, and then there's the very short (almost unnoticable) pauses (0.1 sec or something) that happens about as often. I'd say it's on pair with Oblivion (vanilla). I can also rotate the camera around and it doesnt pause as it did before. I went away from the starting area this time though.

Yep that is my experience with it, but wasn't the exe already flagged ?! it was supposed to be after 1.6 (just shut down my gaming rig)… Good to hear.

Was oblivion that bad ? I honestly just remember that 0.1 sec hitch there… (I'll defer to you on that though having spent only 30 hours on it several years ago)…

Also what had you installed originally that messed with performance like that ?

Originally Posted by JonNik
Yep that is my experience with it, but wasn't the exe already flagged ?! it was supposed to be after 1.6 (just shut down my gaming rig)… Good to hear.

Was oblivion that bad ? I honestly just remember that 0.1 sec hitch there… (I'll defer to you on that though having spent only 30 hours on it several years ago)…

Also what had you installed originally that messed with performance like that ?

I'm not sure it had to do with anything that was installed (i had that Quest pack installed, whatever its called again), it could have been some of the other changes i made or a reset of the .ini (maybe the patching alone does this though). Yeah it think Oblivion was that bad initially, though the good thing with that game is that there's a mod that fixes it almost completely.

Originally Posted by vurt
The small pauses occured very frequently now, they're short but it's annoying that they happen so often, takes you out of the experience. Standing still in one place and then rotating the camera around my character would freeze the screen, every 3-4 seconds or so. You'd think after a while it would have loaded everything in memory and it would be smooth, but no..

I have exactly the same problem. Clean install (GOG version which is IIRC already 1.6), patch 1.75 and nothing else. No mods and no whatever is 4GB_something.
Vsync on, didn't help. Lowered very high to high, didn't help. Didn't mess with .ini yet or something… And I can't believe this is happening. It actually feels like the game is loading something when I rotate or move around. Maybe I should lower things visible in distance?
Hmmm… I'll see it there is an update for the gfx card driver (GTX560), but I really don't think that's the problem as we're talking about 6 years old game and other, newer games, work flawlessly…

Except those frequent stutters, I haven't noticed anything bad yet.

EDIT:
Got the latest nvidia beta driver, set max FPS on 60, lowered details to low, lowered the resolution to 1280x800, nothing helps. In every open area movement forward and rotation causes stutters.

EDIT2:
Finally stutters are brought to probably lowest possible level. Even when I returned back graphics settings (only left the 60FPS max in the ini because I really don't care about more). I did just as vurt - set the gothic3 process priority through task manager on high.
During the rotation I don't feel the game pauses at all, it has however a milisecond pause now and then when I'm moving for a while in one direction.
But seriously, I don't remember G3 behaved like this when I played it ages ago.

Actually I already experienced combat and it's miles away from old G3 where you get caught in the loop if hit once and then you die. And I'm not pro or something, so I got hit here and there. I had to use the healing potion twice (or I should return to the village with the teleport stone to sleep, but I didn't want to do that) and killed a few scavengers and lurkers without suffering from the old G3 "ache".

But keep in mind that I've installed it just to "feel" the new patch. I've preordered Risen2 on Steam and pre-downloaded it already, so… G3 thorough replay will wait till I finish Risen2 first.

EDIT:
OMG didn't even see what's the time, after I wrote this just checked the steam slient, Risen2 is unlocking!!!
In any case, G3 looks playable now with setting the process priority on high, so I'll return to it pretty soon, it won't escape me that easy.

It ran very well for me in about a half hour of playing I had only a couple noticable stutters.

Did I suddenly become terrible at this game though? With alternate balancing on I was getting destroyed, I couldn't even liberate ardea on easy. The orcs repeatedly knocked me down as they don't kill you. My companions also got their asses handed to them so I lead the orc to the rebel camp and the orc's kicked their asses as well.

I've been waiting for the silver bullet to kill that freaking stuttering for years, doesn't sound like this is it. I'll cross my fingers and give this patch a go anyway, then it'll stutter, I'll sigh, close it down and play Risen 2.